tag: Washington State University

Rubbery material for stretchable electronics
Researchers at the University of Houston came up with a rubbery semiconducting material that they say could find applications in stretchable electronics, such as human-machine interfaces, implantable bioelectronics, and robotic skins.
Cunjiang Yu, Bill D. Cook Assistant Professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Houston and correspo... » read more

Integrated solar battery
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) built a unified solar cell-liquid battery device capable of returning more than 14% of the incoming solar energy as electricity.
The device is capable of both converting solar energy to electricity for immediate use or storing it as chemical energy in ... » read more

Water-based li-ion battery
Researchers at the University of Maryland and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory developed a lithium-ion battery that uses a water-salt solution as its electrolyte and reaches the 4.0 volt mark desired for household electronics, without the fire and explosive risks associated with some commercially available non-aqueous lithium-ion batteries.
The battery provides i... » read more

World’s brightest laser
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has set the unofficial record for the world’s brightest laser.
Researchers have focused a laser at a brightness of 1 billion times greater than the surface of the sun. This feat was accomplished using the so-called Diocles Laser at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The laser has a combination of peak power and a repetition ra... » read more

Getting to 1nm
Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley, University of Texas at Dallas, and Stanford University created a transistor with a working 1nm gate from carbon nanotubes and molybdenum disulfide (MoS2).
"The semiconductor industry has long assumed that any gate below 5 nanometers wouldn't work, so anything below that was not even considered," said fir... » read more

Low power Wi-Fi
Computer scientists and electrical engineers from the University of Washington came up with a way to generate Wi-Fi transmissions using 10,000 times less power than conventional methods and which consumes 1,000 times less power than existing energy-efficient wireless communication platforms such as Bluetooth Low Energy and Zigbee.
The system, Passive Wi-Fi, uses backscatte... » read more

Stretchy metal
Washington State University researchers stretched metal films used in flexible electronics to twice their size without breaking.
The discovery could lead to dramatic improvements and addresses one of the biggest challenges in flexible electronics, an industry still in its infancy with applications such as bendable batteries, robotic skins, wearable monitoring devices and se... » read more